… the parallel between the spending and immigration debates is nearly exact — the reason the public is so resistant to raising taxes as a solution to the deficit, and to granting amnesty as a solution to illegal immigration, is that they don’t trust the political class not to take the money (or amnesty) and run.

In other words, a large part of the electorate would grudgingly accept higher taxes or amnesty if they were confident that those unpalatable measures would actually lead to a solution, but people know they wouldn’t. Everyone understands that even those politicians who are sincere in their stated commitment to a bargain that includes future spending cuts or immigration enforcement will welsh on the deal once they get what they’re really after (tax hikes or amnesty, respectively). This is why spending cuts and immigration enforcement have to come first, and overcome all political and legal roadblocks, and be fully implemented, before there should even be a discussion of tax hikes or amnesty.

I see three reasons why this analogy might be wrong, and why cutting a bipartisan (i.e., tax-increasing) deal on the budget deficit might make more sense for conservatives than cutting a “comprehensive” deal on immigration.

1) There’s much more elite support for spending restraint than there is for immigration enforcement. Yes, most professional bipartisans, Bloombergian Third Wayers, and Peter G. Peterson Fiscal Summit attendees believe that taxes need to rise as part of any balanced-budget deal. But as a rule, the “sensible centrist” demographic also genuinely believes that discretionary spending needs to be trimmed, entitlements need to be reformed, and so on down the list of deficit-hawk priorities. (The prevalence of these beliefs inside the Beltway, it should be noted, drive manyliberals to distraction.) The biggest hurdle to cutting spending isn’t the sentiments of the political class; it’s the sentiments of the electorate, which believes in limited government and unlimited entitlement spending, and sees no contradiction between the two.

On immigration, though, this dynamic is reversed: The public is much more likely support enforcement efforts than the political class, which is dominated by open-borders Pollyannas on both sides of the aisle. Which suggests, in turn, that an elite-driven bargain that mixes tax increases and spending cuts has a better chance of actually delivering the goods than an elite-driven bargain that promises both amnesty and enforcement. In the first case, the political class is actually making a deal; in the second, they’re probably conducting a masquerade.

2) The historical record suggests that deficit deals turn out considerably better for conservatives than immigration deals. The last significant grand bargain on immigration was the 1986 reform, which delivered a major amnesty while having almost no impact on illegal migration. The last significant grand bargain on taxes and spending was George H.W. Bush’s 1990 deal with Congressional Democrats, in which he famously betrayed his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge. Conservatives of the Grover Norquist school remember this bargain with scorn, but it helped usher in a decade of low deficitsand lower government spending. (As a percentage of G.D.P., government outlays in the 1990s were lower than in the Reagan ’80s.) There were many reasons for this restraint, including the 1994 Republican revolution and the era of divided government that followed. But at the very least, the ’90 deal turned out much better for the cause of limited government than many conservatives expected at the time — probably for the reasons I sketched out in the previous point.

3) There doesn’t have to be a deal on immigration. The system is dysfunctional, yes, but a dysfunctional immigration system doesn’t threaten the long-term stability and prosperity of the United States the way that the current fiscal imbalance does. It’s fine for conservatives to prefer the current “no deal” scenario on immigration to the kind of bargain that the political class is likely to negotiate. But on the deficit, the picture is very different: We either make a deal, or we endure a debt crisis. And while conservatives have every obligation to hold out for the best possible bargain, they don’t have the luxury of refusing to compromise at all.

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About

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.